Goats n’ Zombies: Play Testing Tox RPG at Pacificon

The Pacificon gaming convention has a fun little room for play testers to drop by and try out some games that are currently being designed. Perfect for TOX Rpg! Here’s some of the great feedback.

The Feedback from Players

Players gave feedback on scales from 1-5 on length of play, easy of learning, game decisions, player down time, interactivity, originality, and fun/enjoyable. So far, we’re rated 5 on game decisions, player downtime, interactivity, and fun! Also, the feedback was 4.5 on ease of learning. So we’re hitting our design goals on speed of play, ease of learning, and most importantly, fun, interactive play!

Some good constructive feedback: more support for game masters. By design, Tox RPG has a lot of flexible narrative elements like open-ended themes and game master choice of when to spring Tox Effects (negative side effects from powers) on players. This is all content we plan to put in our finished, kickstarted processes.

Favorite quote from the feedback:

“Goats n’ zombies! Super fun!”

Designer Observations

Running a custom game in 1 hour with completely different characters on the spot its hard. Maybe come up with some kind of quick-story designer?

Proudest moment of the game: one player came to a point where it might make sense to leave the story. She’d been paid for her job and had no character-based motivation for exploring the creepy old temple. I was racking my brain to improvise a reason for her to continue (aside from just being kind to the GM), when I noticed another character’s power to animate zombies uncontrollably. Also, the character’s side effect was losing control of zombies. So I uncontrollably triggered zombie animation, which raised the characters tox level. The zombie began to chase the characters into the temple!

At this moment, I validated one of my biggest goals with the Tox system: create dramatic, in-game story twists that make it easier for the game master to tell a fun story. If I were on my own, I would have been hard pressed keep the characters together. However, the gifts and tox system allowed me to improvise a story twist based on the characters. The system helped me be a better storyteller.